Off the top of my head:
1. "Dungeons are supposed to be hard"
2. MOP rep system where it had to go back to a bastardized way of getting rep through instances
3. Talent system where Optimum talents still persisted. Most recently they made one of the shammy talents baseline because there was no reason to take anything else in that tier for a shammy healer.

1. Dungeons can be whatever difficulty they should be. They're the primary form of gearing before raiding, thus why should they be difficult? Most of the player base rejected the difficulty of Cata dungeons. Also, to add to that, Mists dungeons weren't super easy. Once you get geared, they become easy. It's the same case in ANY environment (dungeons, scenarios, raiding)
2. Mists rep system was admitted to initially be a failure and has been fixed/tweeked since then. I haven't seen a single person complain about it since then
3. The current talent system is a step in the right direction to not be cookie cutter.

1. Dungeons can be whatever difficulty they should be. They're the primary form of gearing before raiding, thus why should they be difficult? Most of the player base rejected the difficulty of Cata dungeons. Also, to add to that, Mists dungeons weren't super easy. Once you get geared, they become easy. It's the same case in ANY environment (dungeons, scenarios, raiding)
2. Mists rep system was admitted to initially be a failure and has been fixed/tweeked since then. I haven't seen a single person complain about it since then
3. The current talent system is a step in the right direction to not be cookie cutter.

Did you even read my posts? No, dungeons had no business being hard in Cata. I put it in quotation marks to mock a blog post GC made and which he had to reverse not long thereafter. Cata dungeon difficulty was a major failure and GC even made a blog post about how people essentially needed to L2P. I linked to that blog post from 2011 several posts ago.

Did you even read my posts? No, dungeons had no business being hard in Cata. I put it in quotation marks to mock a blog post GC made and which he had to reverse not long thereafter. Cata dungeon difficulty was a major failure and GC even made a blog post about how people essentially needed to L2P. I linked to that blog post from 2011 several posts ago.

What? People make mistakes and then try to fix them as well as they can? Since when?!

Did you even read my posts? No, dungeons had no business being hard in Cata. I put it in quotation marks to mock a blog post GC made and which he had to reverse not long thereafter. Cata dungeon difficulty was a major failure and GC even made a blog post about how people essentially needed to L2P. I linked to that blog post from 2011 several posts ago.

But Cata dungeons were never hard. Only people who are terrible at the game think they were. Which sadly is a large portion of the player base.

I can't bring my self to do dungeons anymore. They are too easy and boring and content like that make me stop playing.

But Cata dungeons were never hard. Only people who are terrible at the game think they were. Which sadly is a large portion of the player base.

Difficulty is relative to a population, not an absolute. I'm sure you're terrible compared to a perfect robot that never makes mistakes.

So, yes, the dungeons were too hard for the intended audience. Insulting that audience may make you feel better, but otherwise doesn't change a thing.

"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"Almost every time I have gotten to know a critic personally, they keep up with the criticism but lose the venom." -- Ghostcrawler
"Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome." -- Samuel Johnson

If you fire someone every time they make a mistake you'll always have someone who has never made mistakes to learn from.

That's true sometimes, but it's a problem when the decisions made went against popular opinion and were sold to us under the guise that fans don't understand what they really want. Subs were soaring under the Wrath model, but a vocal minority were flooding the forums with their epeen tears.

Originally Posted by jazzyy

you think that if WoW doesn't continually rise in subs the person in charge is failing?

Nope, didn't say that. However, it's a huge indicator of a problem in a company when almost half of your customers take their business elsewhere.

Originally Posted by Trogie

But Cata dungeons were never hard. Only people who are terrible at the game think they were. Which sadly is a large portion of the player base.

The game should be tuned to maximize popularity, not to maximize epeen. If it's glory you're looking for, there are schools that need to be built in the developing world. Go for it! ;D

But Cata dungeons were never hard. Only people who are terrible at the game think they were. Which sadly is a large portion of the player base.

I can't bring my self to do dungeons anymore. They are too easy and boring and content like that make me stop playing.

They were substantially harder for the average player than WOTLK ones at launch. That is a fact. I never said they were hard for me. But if I queued up with 4 other people and 1-2 were horrible at avoiding 1 shot mechanics or applying CC properly, I had a long dungeon experience.

For (some) people's viewing pleasure I post a link to a thread I made about why Cata was a failure. (in 2011) It is amusing how at the time people treated 900K subscription loss with contempt saying that only Wrath Newbs and Wrath babies left. 2 years and MILLIONS of subscriptions later, people are still leaving in droves.
The defense mechanism of treating any subscription loss as minor, saying the game was "old" was as active then as it is now.

Wrong. TBC trade channel was "lf3m daily heroic: tank, healer and dps (no cc=no inv)". You really did not get pugs as non-CC dps classes. Rogues that didn't spec into improved sap were frequently kicked out of the group for being noobs.

Umm? Played rogue all the way as my main class since Vanilla and in BC I was getting groups left and right and I sucked at the game. I didn't learn how to be good until Karazhan. Here's my other question, why would you not spec into improved sap? CC is CC and the longer it lasts the better. You were a noob if you didn't do so and to say that a rogue shouldn't be called a noob because he did that makes absolutely no sense. There is a "right" way to play the game, there are sometimes multiple "right" ways to play the game. It's an MMO, why would you not want to spec the best way possible? Theorycrafting is done for a reason and it doesn't take a smart guy to realize that improved sap back then was amazing for 5 mans (not so much for raids).

That's true sometimes, but it's a problem when the decisions made went against popular opinion and were sold to us under the guise that fans don't understand what they really want. Subs were soaring under the Wrath model, but a vocal minority were flooding the forums with their epeen tears.

this just isn't true. subs soared under the classic and bc models and continued up a bit for a few months after wotlk release and began the slow bleed (western) while china growth masked it in the worldwide number.

I disagree. Class balance is closer than it ever was prior to him joining the development team. He does class and tradeskills and has *input* on other areas. Just like we have input.

Classes are "balanced" because they've been homogenized to hell and back. Here's your self-heal. Here's your secondary resource. Here's your healing reduction. Here's your interrupt, your silence, and your cc. Here's your buff that you share with two other classes. Here's your burst cooldown and your timing-based rotation. Here's your defensive cooldown. Give Ghostcrawler another two xpacs and there will be one class where the only "choice" you get will be what your armor looks like and what color sparkles you shoot.

"In today’s America, conservatives who actually want to conserve are as rare as liberals who actually want to liberate. The once-significant language of an earlier era has had the meaning sucked right out of it, the better to serve as camouflage for a kleptocratic feeding frenzy in which both establishment parties participate with equal abandon" (Taking a break from the criminal, incompetentliars at the NSA, to bring you the above political observation, from The Archdruid Report.)

Classes are "balanced" because they've been homogenized to hell and back. Here's your self-heal. Here's your secondary resource. Here's your healing reduction. Here's your interrupt, your silence, and your cc. Here's your buff that you share with two other classes. Here's your burst cooldown and your timing-based rotation. Here's your defensive cooldown. Give Ghostcrawler another two xpacs and there will be one class where the only "choice" you get will be what your armor looks like and what color sparkles you shoot.

Anybody who hast posted or is considering to post in this thread should read this

That is really interesting. I don't know that it's possible to bully Ghostcrawler. If anything, I think GC has done his own share of bullying, especially when he has the opportunity to feel intellectually superior. So you'll have to excuse me if I don't feel sorry for him. However, I do agree that in a lot of cases the abuse of video game developers goes much too far. Vesseblah, I think you're a supporter of Ghostcrawler and a more challenging version of WoW? It's important to remember that it was fan "bullying" that caused the successful Wrath model to be abandoned.

That's because you've dehumanized him. To you, GC is a force of nature, and his every action is an act of malice perpetrated against the class of player that fails to benefit from it. To people who think like you the over-tuned difficulty in Cataclysm wasn't a miscalculation; it was a thwarted attempt to exclude non-raiders from the game. The changes to PvP weren't intended to balance the playing field; they were intended to punish PvPers for daring to enjoy PvP. Please cite specific instances where you felt GC was the bully. I have yet to see a quote where he deliberately went out of his way to insult anyone.

That's because you've dehumanized him. To you, GC is a force of nature, and his every action is an act of malice perpetrated against the class of player that fails to benefit from it. To people who think like you the over-tuned difficulty in Cataclysm wasn't a miscalculation; it was a thwarted attempt to exclude non-raiders from the game. The changes to PvP weren't intended to balance the playing field; they were intended to punish PvPers for daring to enjoy PvP. Please cite specific instances where you felt GC was the bully. I have yet to see a quote where he deliberately went out of his way to insult anyone.

Although I agree strongly that GC gets lots of harassment -- and I've been trying not to scapegoat him, these days, for that reason -- he's volleyed some pretty barbed insults at players who pointed out inconsistencies in design policy. The most notorious example is referenced on this page: His post defending Cataclysm dungeon difficulty (this was roughly when I left Cata, i.e. Jan 2011). It was a thinly veiled "learn to play" dismissal at a player who said LFG was too hard -- and a pretty sad one, considering Cata dungeons were tuned so poorly in 4.0 that a single idiot could wreck them with 4 good players compensating.

(edit) To be clear, I'm not trying to justify the harassment he gets. I am trying to say that no one should claim he's totally innocent of insulting and/or bad behavior.

Half of this thread is nothing but bullying, and the posts demanding for him to be fired are among the nicer ones...

Originally Posted by Toadstone

I think you're a supporter of Ghostcrawler and a more challenging version of WoW?

I think the game balance is better than in any previous expansions, talking from the point of view of somebody whose gametime is spent 80% in heroic mode 25man raids. Sure it could be better, but it's gone in the right direction so I think as a guy who's in charge of game balance GC has done good job overall.

For me the challenge level is just about right in MoP raids, finishing the tier about month before next one comes out. Not too long downtime before next one, and not impossible either. But then again raid design or the overall game difficulty is not something GC is in charge of, only in advisory position along with other team leads.

Originally Posted by Toadstone

It's important to remember that it was fan "bullying" that caused the successful Wrath model to be abandoned.

Originally Posted by Vulcanasm

The most notorious example is referenced on this page: His post defending Cataclysm dungeon difficulty (this was roughly when I left Cata, i.e. Jan 2011). It was a thinly veiled "learn to play" dismissal at a player who said LFG was too hard

GC and various other blue posters have said multiple times they went deliberately for harder PvE content in cata because people whined about easy WLK instances on various forums. And afterwards during MoP beta they also said the difficulty was a big mistake that will not be repeated.

Last edited by vesseblah; 2013-08-16 at 09:38 PM.

Never going to log into this garbage forum again as long as calling obvious troll obvious troll is the easiest way to get banned.
Trolling should be.

It most certainly did not and my hope is that the developers come to this conclusion as well. I remember towards the end of cataclysm just before mists came out their was a podcast interview with ghostcrawler where he basically spent the entire interview trash talking cataclysm and maintaining that "they got it" now and mists was the result of them "getting it". Mists is a COLOSSAL failure.

The hammer comes down:

Originally Posted by Osmeric

Normal should be reduced in difficulty. Heroic should be reduced in difficulty.
And the tiny fraction for whom heroic raids are currently well tuned? Too bad,so sad! With the arterial bleed of subs the fastest it's ever been, the vanity development that gives you guys your own content is no longer supportable.

I might be going ham on GC and forgetting his humanity. You're right. I feel kinda bad if I imagine him reading this and having hurt feelings. However, I just don't see GC--with the hubris he's displayed--being a person who would be particularly upset about negative feedback. He's even said himself that he laughs at the haters. He might be lying?

Originally Posted by Ronduwil

people who think like you

I don't feel Cata tuning was a personal attack on me (and I haven't mentioned PVP). I've said I feel the game could have gone in a different direction and continued to grow--or at least not dropped like a lead weight--had the right decisions been made. Cata tuning was in direct opposition to what made Wrath successful, which is why it still comes up in discussions like this. It stands out as the turning point for the game. Cata sold amazingly well off the back of Wrath, but then as players hit 85 they were just dumbfounded at entry level endgame. Kind of how fresh 90s felt about convoluted rep gating.

Originally Posted by Ronduwil

Please cite specific instances where you felt GC was the bully.

Thread: 683484

Originally Posted by vesseblah

game difficulty is not something GC is in charge of, only in advisory position along with other team leads.

I agree it's better to ask questions of everybody involved in setting the direction of the game, not just GC.